There Could Soon Be a Pill to Make Us More Compassionate

How brain chemistry influences compassion

Biology may have a lot to do with our behavior, especially in social situations. And that means our social interactions could be manipulated by a pill.

That’s what a new study, published in the journal Current Biology, suggests. A group led by researchers at University of California Berkeley and University of California San Francisco shows that by manipulating a brain chemical, people can become more compassionate and act in prosocial ways to equalize differences.

In the study, 35 men and women visited the labs two times; each time they were randomly given a pill that keeps levels of dopamine, which is involved in reward and satisfaction, or a placebo. Neither the participants nor the scientists knew which pills were given when. The volunteers were then asked to divide money between themselves and a strangers.

When the researchers analyzed the results, they found that when the people were given the dopamine drug, they were more likely to share the money equitably compared to when they took the placebo.

The results certainly aren’t the answer to promoting more compassion in society, but they do hint that behaviors like social interaction might be affected by changing basic biological systems in the brain. “We have taken an important step toward learning how our aversion to inequity is influenced by our brain chemistry,” Ignacio Sáez, one of the study’s authors and a postdoctoral researcher at Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, said in a statement. “Studies in the past decade have shed light on the neural circuits that govern how we behave in social situations. What we show here is one brain ‘switch’ we can affect.”

How Religion Can Move Us to Do Terrible Things

Faith is supposed to be inclusive, but flip it on its head and terrible things result

Anyone who has ever played on a team knows the thrill of rooting for your own side’s success while rejoicing at your opponents’ losses. Now ratchet up that gratifying feeling with two other ingredients: an unwavering belief in a vengeful God, and a sense of injury stemming from feeling like a reviled, hard-done-by outsider, and you have some of the precursors of the Charlie Hebdo massacre.

Clearly, the murders are not remotely justifiable. At the same time, such violence is not haphazard. Combine extreme religion’s blinders with social ostracism, then season with the testosterone-driven aggressive impulses often found among disaffected young men and you can end up with a lethal stew.

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What’s the evidence? Time and again, social psychology experiments have shown that ordinary people can be spurred to commit horrific acts of cruelty. Giving them authority over arbitrarily defined transgressors can prompt brutality, as the Stanford Prison Experiment—in which students were assigned to playact the roles of either guards or prisoners—showed in the 1970s. Persuading them that outsiders are less than human can disable their natural powers of empathy. Priming religious believers with passages showing that God endorses revenge against malefactors is dangerously effective, too.

In 2007, the Michigan social scientist, Brad Bushman, led a study of nearly 500 students, half of whom were Mormons studying at Brigham Young University; the other half were mostly secular students enrolled at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam. All were given a violent passage to read that was said to be taken directly from scripture, or alternately, from an unidentified “ancient scroll.” Depicting the rape of a married woman traveling in a foreign region with her husband, the passage sometimes included a sentence in which God commands acts of revenge against the rapists’ foreign tribe. There was no mention of retribution in the passage read by the control group—a subset of the total 500, who were equally likely to be American or Dutch.

Next, all of the participants competed on a task in which the winner could blast the loser with a painfully loud noise through headphones. Who were the most aggressive blasters? More often than not they were the students—both American and Dutch—who identified themselves as fervent believers. They were also most likely to have been shown a passage of what they were told was scripture—rather than an ancient scroll—and to have read about God’s desire for violent retribution. Oh, and these students were also more likely to be male.

Religious men, even ones who regularly read about deities sanctioning violence in their holy books, don’t usually feel the license to kill, of course. In fact, you might expect the opposite. After all, religious people are more likely to do good than other people. They volunteer and donate blood more often than non-believers. They give more money to charity. In most psychology experiments they are more generous and less dishonest than atheists, and in the real world, they commit fewer crimes and abuse illegal subtances less, too. In fact, in the majority of the 39 countries polled by a 2014 Pew study, people say that a belief in God is required to be a moral person. That opinion was most common in poor regions such as Central Asia, and West Africa. But 53 percent of Americans also agree that religious belief makes you more ethical.

So what’s going on? The Parisian terrorists were devout, and like all major religions, Islam espouses the Golden Rule. Why didn’t that stop them from killing?

Part of the answer is that while religion is exquisitely designed to bind people together, enabling them to trust and protect each other, denigrating outsiders can be the flip side of that trust—and that denigration can snuff out empathy fast. Now, brain imaging studies tell us that witnessing bad things happen to those outsiders can make people feel powerful and superior.

Michael Inzlicht at the University of Toronto recently demonstrated that finding by arbitrarily dividing participants into two groups he named “the reds” and “the blues.” The “red” group was shown a video of a model performing certain rituals. After watching the model bow, turn around, and put her hands together, the members of the red group were asked to perform those movements at home for a week. The gestures meant nothing but could serve as a proxy for religious rituals—which have profound meaning to practitioners. The blues had no rituals.

The two groups then played a trust game, and Inzlicht found that the ritualizing “reds” distrusted the nonritualizing outgroup much more than they had before. Not only that, but a subsequent EEG showed that when the blues received negative feedback, the reds showed brain activity consistent with experiencing pleasure. “When they observed the outgroup member getting punished, they enjoyed their misfortunes,” said Prof. Inzlicht.

Now, consider that the perpetrators of last week’s horrifying violence felt excluded by French society—and found their place in an echo chamber of other angry, disenfranchised, and aggressive young men. Add the pain of rejection—which brain imaging studies show can actually be experienced as real, visceral pain—and you get a tinderbox of explosive feelings: A powerful desire to escape a marginalized social situation; to gain a sense of belonging and status by acting as enforcers of a religion’s sacred values; to earn the approval of charismatic religious leaders who incite them to punish “transgressors;”and finally, to experience the anticipated pleasure of witnessing the outsider’s pain.

The terrorists made a choice. It wasn’t rational—even if they believed it was. It certainly wasn’t moral. But their dark minds still merit our study. Understanding the psychology behind their religious blinders is as critical to democracy as condemning their actions.

Susan Pinker is a psychologist and award-winnning writer whose last book, The Sexual Paradox, was published in 17 countries. Her most recent book is The Village Effect.

TIME Ideas hosts the world's leading voices, providing commentary and expertise on the most compelling events in news, society, and culture. We welcome outside contributions. To submit a piece, email ideas@time.com.

Jealousy: One More Way Men and Women are Different

Anton Ovcharenko—Getty ImagesTrouble ahead: Just which kind depends on who's at the door

It's never easy to be cheated on, but how you react depends on your sex

Not that I cheated on my college girlfriend when we were both freshmen attending schools 130 miles apart. But if I did, I had an excuse: I was young, I was male and I was an idiot. These are conditions that psychologists like to call “co-morbid.”

The only good thing I can say about myself in this very hypothetical scenario, is that at least I had the honesty to ‘fess up to my faithlessness the next time I saw her. She was not—you won’t be surprised to learn—pleased with my behavior. But what I was surprised to learn (bearing in mind the young, male and stupid thing again) was that she was less upset by the sexual aspect of my infidelity than the emotional.

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Soon enough, I came to learn that that was the way of things when it comes to women’s reactions to cheating—or at least that’s the stereotype. The equally glib corollary is that men can tolerate the nuzzling and canoodling part of infidelity better than they can the flesh crescendo it leads to.

Now, research out of Chapman University in Orange, California confirms that when it comes to this one aspect of the great gender divide, the big news is that there is no news to report. The stereotypes, it turns out, are spot on.

The study, published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior, was an ambitious one, involving a whopping 63,894 male and female respondents of both sexes, aged 18 to 65. In addition to basic biographical information such as income, marital history and sexual orientation, the participants were asked to choose (whether from imagination or painful experience) if they’d be hurt more by the carnal or cuddly part of being cheated on.

By a margin that would qualify as a landslide in politics, heterosexual men outpaced heterosexual women 54% to 35% on the physical side of the hurt-feelings equation, while heterosexual women beat heterosexual men 65% to 46% on the emotional side. Homosexual and bisexual men and women were troubled more or less equally by both aspects.

“Heterosexual men really stand out from all other groups,” said psychologist and lead author David Frederick, in a statement. “They were the only ones more likely to be most upset by sexual infidelity.”

In fairness to the straight guys, there’s more than just the doofus factor at work here—there’s also evolution, according to the authors. Short of a paternity test (which hardly existed when our behavioral coding was first being written millions of year ago), a male can never be absolutely certain that a child his mate bears is his, so physical infidelity poses a much greater risk.

And while males in the state of nature are hardwired to mate and mate and mate some more because it’s easy, fun and a calorically cheap way to get their genes across to the next generation, females are coded to seek protection and resources since it’s awfully hard to fetch food and defend against predators while giving birth and nursing. Even modern women are thus inclined—at least evolutionarily—to worry more about the outside romance that may cost them a partner than the roll in the hay that could be a one-time thing.

Societal expectations—outmoded though they may be—exacerbate the difference. Men are still judged more harshly (if only by themselves) in terms of their sexual prowess, while women are brought up to value bonding. Being cheated on thus has a different effect on the sexes because it threatens different aspects of their self-esteem.

Making the study more impressive was that the researchers corrected for nearly every variable other than gender that could have influenced the results—and repeatedly came up empty. Marital status didn’t play a role, nor did a history of being cheated on, nor did income, length of relationship or whether a respondent had children or not. The only factor that seemed to make some difference was that younger respondents of both genders reported a higher degree of upset at the physical aspects of infidelity. That’s probably because younger people of both sexes are in the stage of their lives when they’re helping themselves to that aspect more, so it makes a bigger difference in their relational well-being.

None of this alters the larger takeaway, which is that cheating still stinks. And none of it changes the fact that even a few decades on, a hypothetical person who was guilty of such a thing might still feel kind of bad about it. Or that’s what I’ve been told, but I wouldn’t know. Really.

Count your blessings. Say “thank you.” Consider yourself lucky. They’re directives our parents gave us so we would grow into decent people with decent manners. It turns out, the same advice helps make our brains and bodies healthier, too. “There is a magnetic appeal to gratitude,” says Robert Emmons, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Davis, and a pioneer of gratitude research. “It speaks to a need that’s deeply entrenched.” It’s as if we need to give thanks and be thanked, just as it’s important to feel respected and connected socially. From an evolutionary perspective, feelings of gratitude probably helped bind communities together. When people appreciate the goodness that they’ve received, they feel compelled to give back. This interdependence allows not only an individual to survive and prosper but also society as a whole. It’s easy, in these modern times, to forget this, however. We’re too busy or distracted, or we’ve unwittingly become a tad too self-entitled. We disconnect from others and suffer the consequences, such as loneliness, anger, or even a less robust immune system.

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“Gratitude serves as a corrective,” says Emmons, who is the author of Gratitude Works! But by gratitude, he doesn’t mean just uttering a “Hey, thanks” or shooting off a perfunctory e-mail. He means establishing a full-on gratitude ritual, whether it’s a morning meditation of what you’re thankful for, a bedtime counting of blessings, or a gratitude journal (see How to Give Thanks, right). This concerted, consistent effort to notice and appreciate the good things flowing to us—from the crunch of autumn leaves to the holiday spirit—changes us for the better on many levels, say gratitude experts. Here’s how.

1. You’ll feel happier.

In a seminal study by Emmons, subjects who wrote down one thing that they were grateful for every day reported being 25 percent happier for a full six months after following this practice for just three weeks. In a University of Pennsylvania study, subjects wrote letters of gratitude to people who had done them a major service but had never been fully thanked. After the subjects personally presented these letters, they reported substantially decreased symptoms of depression for as long as a full month.

In Emmons’s gratitude-journal studies, those who regularly wrote down things that they were thankful for consistently reported an ever increasing sense of vitality. Control subjects who simply kept a general diary saw little increase, if any. The reason is unclear, but improvements in physical health (see below), also associated with giving thanks, may have something to do with it. The better your body functions, the more energetic you feel.

3. You get healthier.

A gratitude practice has also been associated with improved kidney function, reduced blood-pressure and stress-hormone levels, and a stronger heart. Experts believe that the link comes from the tendency of grateful people to appreciate their health more than others do, which leads them to take better care of themselves. They avoid deleterious behaviors, like smoking and drinking excessive alcohol. They exercise, on average, 33 percent more and sleep an extra half hour a night.

When we notice kindness and other gifts we’ve benefited from, our brains become wired to seek out the positives in any situation, even dire ones. As a result, we’re better at bouncing back from loss and trauma. “A grateful stance toward life is relatively immune to both fortune and misfortune,” says Emmons. We see the blessings, not just the curses.

5. You’ll improve your relationship.

A 2012 Journal of Personality and Social Psychology study of more than 300 coupled people found that those who felt more appreciated by their partners were more likely to appreciate their partners in return and to stay in the relationship nine months later, compared with couples who didn’t feel appreciated by each other. Christine Carter, a sociologist at the Greater Good Science Center, at the University of California, Berkeley, notes that gratitude can rewire our brains to appreciate the things in our relationships that are going well. It can calm down the nervous system and counter the fight-or-flight stress response, she says. You can’t be grateful and resentful at the same time.

People can’t help but pay gratitude forward. When appreciation is expressed, it triggers a biological response in the recipient’s brain, including a surge of the feel-good chemical dopamine, says Emmons. So when you express gratitude toward a spouse, a colleague, or a friend, he or she feels grateful in return, and the back-and-forth continues. What’s more, thanking your benefactors makes them feel good about the kind acts that they’ve done, so they want to continue doing them, not only for you but also for others.

Inspired? Research has shown that one of the best ways to home in on the people and the experiences we appreciate is through writing in a gratitude journal. Recording our thoughts, by hand or electronically, helps us focus them, explains Emmons, who says that he, too, does this exercise to remind himself “how good gratitude is. It gives us time to understand better the meaning and importance of people and events in our lives.” Here are strategies for maximizing the benefits:

1. Go for depth rather than breadth. This will help you truly savor what you appreciate, and keep your journal from becoming simply a list of nice thoughts. (Journals like that tend to get abandoned.)

2. Write consistently. But it’s OK if you can’t do it every day. Once or twice a week is enough to boost happiness.

3. Write freely. Don’t sweat the grammar and the spelling. No one else will see this journal unless you want someone to.

4. Don’t think of this as just one more self-improvement project. Rather, it’s an opportunity to reflect on other people and the above-and-beyond things that they’ve done for you, says Emmons. In other words, “it’s not all about us,” he says. “This may be the most important lesson about trying to become more grateful.”

“Firing an employee, divorcing a spouse, dealing with a messy roommate by changing roommates: all are Method 1… Fundamentally they eliminate the behavior by restraining the subject physically from the performance, or by eliminating the presence of the subject. The vital thing to understand about Method 1 is that it teaches the subject nothing.”

Method 2: Punishment. (Everybody’s favorite, in spite of the fact that it almost never really works.)

“Punishment does not teach a child how to achieve a better report card. The most the punisher can hope for is that the child’s motivation will change: The child will try to alter future behavior in order to avoid future punishment.”

If punishment almost never works, why do we do it? We have an ulterior motive: “…establishing and maintaining dominance. The punisher may be primarily interested not in behavior but in being proved to be of higher status.”

“People use spontaneous negative reinforcers on each other all the time: the warning glance, the frown, the disapproving remark. Some children’s lives, and some spouse’s lives too, are filled with constant daily effort to behave in such a way as to avoid disapproval.”

“Extinction in human interactions best applies, it seems to me, to verbal behavior — whining, quarreling, teasing, bullying. If these kinds of behavior do not produce results, do not get a rise out of you, they extinguish.”

“…training a dog to lie in the dining-room doorway when people are eating… Going away and lying down is incompatible with begging at the table; a dog cannot physically be in two places at once, and so begging is eliminated.”

Method 6: Put the behavior on cue. (Then you never give the cue. This is the dolphin trainer’s most elegant method of getting rid of unwanted behavior.)

“…when the organism learns to offer the behavior in response to some kind of cue and only then — the behavior tends to extinguish in the absence of the cue. You can use this natural law to get rid of all kinds of things you don’t want, simply by bringing the behavior under the control of a cue… and then never giving the cue.”

Method 7: “Shape the absence”; reinforce anything and everything that is not the undesired behavior. (A kindly way to turn disagreeable relatives into agreeable relatives.)

“I used Method 7 to change my mother’s behavior on the telephone… The conversations were usually, and sometimes excessively concerned with my mother’s problems… I deliberately let her complaints and tears extinguish – Method 4…I then reinforced anything and everything that was not a complaint… within two months the proportion of tears and distress to chat and laughter in our weekly phone calls became reversed.”

Method 8: Change the motivation. (This is the fundamental and most kindly method of all.)

TIME Ideas hosts the world's leading voices, providing commentary and expertise on the most compelling events in news, society, and culture. We welcome outside contributions. To submit a piece, email ideas@time.com.

7 Ways to Be a Better Schmoozer

Keep it short and sweet

With conference season in full swing, you may soon find yourself in a room full of strangers with absolutely nothing to say. Experts suggest breaking that awkward silence by schmoozing to develop and maintain mutually positive and powerful professional relationships. It’s really about networking, building rapport and making connections. “When you enter a conversation with people, you want to be thinking about, What are they working on? What do I know about that? How can I add value?” says Michelle Tillis Lederman, author of The 11 Laws of Likability: Relationship Networking…Because People Do Business With People They Like (Amacom). Clear communication and witty anecdotes will help you win over the crowd. Here’s how to get started:

1. IDENTIFY THE RIGHT TALE TO TELL. “In social and business circles, you can tell a story to entertain, to show off your energy level and your social position, and to increase trust and find common ground,” says Nicholas Boothman, author of Convince Them in 90 Seconds* or Less: Make Instant Connections That Pay Off in Business and in Life (Workman Publishing Company). In fact, doing this provides a platform to engage and reach people, and gives you a chance to ignite leadership opportunities.

2. MAKE YOUR POINT. The success of the tale lies in its cause and effect. When you use an anecdote to teach a lesson or modify behavior, state your point at the start, then move on to the details.

3. TIME YOUR STORY. Sense the tone of the conversation. “You want to listen to the other person with your eyes and your ears,” says Lederman. Defining the moment involves listening, accessing what’s being heard and looking for points of connection. Bring your full personality to the exchange, search for common ground and then go for it.

4. USE DESCRIPTIVE LANGUAGE. When told in “color,” or using sensory-rich wording, the account could enhance the imagination of both the storyteller and the listener. Aspiring narrators need to practice privately at first, describing an experience in black-and-white terms, and then take a few minutes to relate the story in color, talking about what you see, hear, feel, smell and taste. If you match the right feeling with powerful words, the yarn will unfold on its own.

5. KEEP IT SHORT AND SWEET. Boothman discourages a professional from arriving at work or events “loaded up with stories.” As a basic rule, however, experts encourage him or her to have a clear meaning, be concise and include who, where and when.

6. DON’T BORE. Brevity, relevance and presentations given in color are fundamental to entertaining narratives. “Human beings are energy systems. We thrive on the quality and the quantity of the energy we get from other people,” says Boothman. “Imbue your audience with enthusiasm, curiosity, feedback, empathy and imagination.” But don’t share convoluted stories that miss major punch lines. If you can’t deliver the tale with power and punch, don’t tell it.

7. ADD VALUE. “Schmoozing adds a level of comfort, of validation, and as a result people are more apt to go above and beyond to provide a service to you or fulfill a need they desire,” says Leslie Jones, employee relations manager at Brevard County Government Center in Viera, Florida. “Individuals adept at chitchat take advantage of these networking opportunities to improve business relationships because people do business with those they like and trust.”

TIME Ideas hosts the world's leading voices, providing commentary and expertise on the most compelling events in news, society, and culture. We welcome outside contributions. To submit a piece, email ideas@time.com.

Some people are better than others at weathering these periods, able to go about their normal lives while only occasionally dwelling on what might happen. The rest of us are nearly paralyzed by the uncertainty, riding waves of hope and despair as we ruminate over every possible outcome.

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Kate Sweeny, an associate professor of psychology at University of California Riverside, has made a career out of studying these differences in waiting behaviors. And she’s identified the personality traits that may make distinguish those who are better and worse at waiting—some of which, thankfully, may be adaptable.

In Sweeny’s latest study, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, she and a colleague studied 50 law school graduates who were waiting for the results of the California bar exam in 2011. The lawyers filled out detailed personality questionnaires that revealed how well they managed uncertainty, whether they were more optimistic or pessimistic, and their self-esteem. She and her colleague also explored how well the lawyers managed their emotions and expectations, and the coping mechanisms they tended to use when they were anxious, among other things.

Not surprisingly, they found that having an optimistic outlook and being more comfortable with uncertainty helped people handle waiting periods better. But they also found that self-esteem did not seem to have much effect on tempering anxiety during the waiting period. In other words, it didn’t matter whether the participants had reported having high self-esteem or not; what mattered more was whether they tended to have a positive outlook and expect the best.

“I was surprised, since plenty of other research suggested that high self-esteem should help people get through difficult periods when their ego is threatened,” says Sweeny.

It also turned out that people’s states during the waiting period were dynamic, changing depending on how close they were to finding out the outcome. At the beginning of the wait, it was harder for all of the participants to distract themselves from thinking about the possible outcomes, and all of them—even the optimists—became more pessimistic or entertained more negative thoughts about the result as they got closer to the moment of truth.

Sweeny and her colleague also learned some interesting things about the coping mechanisms that people use to get through the uncertainty and anxiety of waiting. While distracting yourself with other unrelated tasks or thoughts was a common tactic, it didn’t prove very successful, especially if the participants were trying very hard to consciously distract themselves. “The fact that they are trying so hard to not feel so anxious actually backfires, because it anything it keeps the uncertainty in mind,” she says.

Anticipating bad news and trying to find the positive in it—preparing ahead of time for failure, in other words—may not help to ease the anxiety during the waiting period, but can be helpful once the result comes, since it gives people a sense of control over their future.

And the same is true for distancing your sense of self worth from the outcome. The more space you put between the result and your sense of self, the easier the final outcome may be. “If you convince yourself the bar exam is not that important, and that it’s just a silly exam you have to take and doesn’t reflect on your or your abilities, that space might help you not have a crushing blow to your ego if the news is bad,” she says.

But for all the worriers out there who can’t distract themselves from the anguish of “what if”’ while waiting, there’s also some solace. The study found that those who had a harder time during the waiting period fared better emotionally after the result, regardless of whether it was bad or good. The participants in the study who had more anxiety and frustration while waiting for their bar exam results and ended up failing, for example, were more likely to turn around and start studying for the test again compared to those who didn’t worry as much about the outcome. And if they passed, the relief was sweeter. “There’s a relief when the waiting is over and things turned out well, and you don’t feel as bad if you get bad news,” says Sweeny. “Either way, it’s a little less of a harsh blow if you had a tough waiting period.”

Still, to make that period less painful, she’s currently studying the effects of mindfulness meditation to help those who can’t stop obsessing over the outcome while they wait. The technique, she says, is perfectly designed for managing such waits, since it focuses on helping people to accept their negative emotions but not be driven by them. So while waiting will never be easy, some things in your control, at least, may make it more bearable.

A new study from the University of Georgia (UGA) published in the journal Aggressive Behavior reveals that when it comes to being mean to your peers, it’s not girls who rule the school, but boys.

It has long been speculated by social researchers that boys are more physically aggressive while girls are more relationally aggressive. To put that in middle-school terms: boys are more likely to shove you into a locker, while girls are more apt to spread a rumor that you didn’t wear deodorant to gym class. Relationally aggressive behavior is the stuff that Mean Girls is made of — malicious rumors, social exclusion and rejection — and it turns out that boys are pretty good at it too.

In fact, as researchers followed a group of boys and girls from middle school to high school, they found that, at every grade level, boys engaged in so-called relationally aggressive behavior more often than girls. The boys were also more physically aggressive than the girls, which leads to an interesting side note: the study seems to have scientifically proved what many have known to be true — middle school ain’t fun. The UGA study shows that the highest levels of physical and relational aggression are present in students from sixth through eighth grade, with all levels of aggression declining throughout high school before reaching a low during senior year. In short, aggressive behavior is at its worst in middle school, but it gets better.

Pamela Orpinas, a professor of health promotion and behavior in the College of Public Health at UGA, led the study and analyzed data collected from 620 students randomly selected from six northeast Georgia school districts. Student participants completed yearly surveys, which allowed the UGA researchers to identify and group them in distinct trajectories for relational aggression and victimization as they progressed from Grade Six to 12 trusting the students to self-report both physically and relationally aggressive behavior and victimization.

“Overall, we found relational aggression to be a very common behavior,” says Orpinas, who notes in an interview with TIME that for the most part, middle school and high school age children are not particularly aggressive, even if they may make snide comments about a classmate at some point. “Almost all of the students surveyed, 96%, had passed a rumor or made a nasty comment about someone over the course of the seven-year study.” Her study revealed that a majority (54%) of the students were unlikely to be perpetrators of relationally aggressive behavior and only 6.5% were ranked “high” as likely perpetrators. Among those students who were perpetrators of violence, the study found that boys were more likely to be both moderate perpetrators (boys 55%, girls 45%) and high perpetrators (boys 66.7%, girls 33.3%) of relationally aggressive behavior.

Still, the study has its limitations: it’s based on a relatively small sample size of students from Georgia schools, rather than looking at a nationally representative sample. Orpinas notes there’s little research on mean boys so far, but hopes to look more closely at the phenomenon in the future. For now, with the “mean girls” myth dispelled, she recommends boys be included in the same school-based programs that have traditionally been used to keep girls from being mean to each other. And maybe that Mean Girls sequel should be called Mean Boys, which would be so fetch.

Breaking Bad Action Figures? Really, Toys R Us?

In a spectacularly bad bit of judgment, the big box store puts a meth manufacturer on its shelves.

Human history is often defined by its very worst pitch meetings. Take the one in 1812, when one of Napoleon’s generals told the Great Emperor, “I’ve got an idea. Let’s invade Russia—in the winter!” Or the one in 1985, when the anonymous product developer at Coca-Cola said, “How ’bout we take a product everyone loves, quit making it and replace it with a different formulation no one is asking for! What could go wrong?”

So too it must have gone in the executive suites of Toys R Us, when someone made the compelling case for stocking a brand-new line of action figures based on the wildly successful Breaking Bad series. After all, nothing quite says holiday shopping like a bendable, fully costumed figurine of Walter White—the murderous chemistry teacher turned crystal meth manufacturer—and Jesse Pinkman, his former student and current bag man. And you want accessories? We’ve got accessories—including a duffle bag stuffed with imaginary cash and a plastic bag of, yes, faux crystal meth for White. Pinkman comes with a gas mask, because the folks at Toys R Us are not the kind to forget about corporate responsibility. If your kids are going to grow up to run a meth lab, it’s never too early to teach them basic safety.

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It might not surprise you to learn that Toys R Us has faced a teensy bit of blowback from this curious marketing decision. Florida mom Susan Schrivjer has posted a petition on Change.org that has just exceeded 2,000 signatures, demanding that the company pull the products. She also appeared on The Today Show to make her case more publicly.

“Anything to do with drugs is not doing the right thing,” she said. “I just think they need to look at their vision and values as they call them.”

The part that’s more surprising—but sadly only a little—is that even after being called on its appalling lack of judgment, Toys R Us has not responded with the quickest, loudest, most abject oops in corporate history. Instead, it is standing its ground. Why? Because the dolls are sold only in the “adult section” of the store, of course—the ones intended for shoppers 15 and up.

OK, let’s start with the fact that Toys R Us has an adult section at all—something I never knew and I suspect many other parents didn’t either. So what will they stock there next? A line of Toys R Us hard cider? Toys R Us adult literature? A Toys R Us edition of Fifty Shades of Gray—which is really OK because hey, it actually comes with a set of 50 gray crayons? If an adult section must exist at all, at what point does full disclosure require the company to rebrand itself “Toys as Well as Other Things Not Remotely Appropriate For Children But Don’t Worry Because We Keep Them in a Separate Section, R Us”?

More important, let’s look at above-15 as the dividing line for the adult section—a distinction that makes perfect sense because if there’s anything 15 year olds are known for, it’s their solid judgment, their awareness of consequences, their exceptional impulse control and their utter imperviousness to the siren song of drugs and alcohol. Oh, and they never, ever emulate bad role models they encounter on TV, in the movies or among their peers. What’s more, kids below the age of 15 never, ever run wild in a sensory theme park like a big box toy store, finding themselves in departments not meant for them and seeing products they shouldn’t see. Toys R Us, you’ve thought this one out to the last detail!

What the company’s consumer researchers probably know and if they don’t they ought to, is that the brain’s frontal lobes—where higher order executive functions live—aren’t even fully myelinated until we reach our late 20s, which is why young people can be so spectacularly reckless, why soldiers and political firebrands tend to be young and why judges, heads of state and clerical leaders tend to be old. The adult fan of Breaking Bad might actually enjoy the new toys as collectors items–something to be bought or given as a gift with a little twinkle of irony, a this-is-so-wrong-it’s-right sort of thing. But that kind of nuance isn’t remotely within a child’s visible spectrum.

Really, Toys R Us, there is absolutely no surviving this one. Back up the truck, pack up the toys and send them to a landfill. And if you’re even thinking about following this one up with a Boardwalk Empire board game complete with a Nucky Thompson plush toy, stop now. Or at the very least, invite me to the pitch meeting.

TIME Ideas hosts the world's leading voices, providing commentary and expertise on the most compelling events in news, society, and culture. We welcome outside contributions. To submit a piece, email ideas@time.com.

How to Drink Less and Still Have Fun

A new study suggests using a smaller glass, keeping your glass on the table while you pour, and never filling it over half-full

If you’re like most people, your brain loves it when you drink—and it shows you its appreciation by rewarding you for it. A few sips of the right stuff and you feel funnier, smarter, more confident, and certainly more attractive to the opposite sex—even if not all of this stands up to later, sober scrutiny. Your body, however, was never consulted on the deal, which may be why it makes you feel absolutely lousy the day after a night on the tiles.

Down through millennia, drinkers have sought to thread that brain-body needle, drinking just enough to have fun but not so much as to be miserable in the morning, and there have been no shortage of strategies: take a glass of water between each drink; hold it to one drink per hour. Now, a study in the International Journal of Drug Policy, conducted by researchers at Iowa State and Cornell Universities, takes a new look at the cues and conditions that cause people to drink too much and, more important, suggests ways to avoid them.

For all its cultivated rep, it’s wine that can cause drinkers the most headaches—literally and otherwise—because in many situations it’s hard to gauge how much you’re consuming. Beer is typically served in bottles or cans, which are easy enough to keep track of. And liquor is often poured and mixed by the shot—one of the few units of measure that enjoys diplomatic recognition in both the imperial and metric scales. But wine? That comes in wide glasses and narrow glasses, stemless glasses and flutes; often as not you free-pour it—about the least precise method of portion control imaginable—and while wine frequently accompanies a meal, it’s just as often simply walk-and-talk party fuel.

To study what makes drinkers free-pour too freely, the investigators recruited 73 student volunteers (“all of legal drinking age,” the study stressed) and allowed them to serve themselves wine at a variety of testing stations. Sometimes standard wine glasses were made available, sometimes larger glasses, and sometimes extra wide ones. Red and white wine were both offered, and students were alternately instructed either to hold the glass while pouring or leave it on the table. Every one of these variables made a difference in how much the students served themselves.

Wide glasses caused subjects to pour 11.9% more than narrow ones—the same fill-the-space phenomenon that leads people to heap more pasta onto a big plate than a small one. Holding the glass as opposed to leaving it on the table resulted in a 12.2% bigger serving—perhaps because when the glass moves even a little it’s harder to gauge the level of liquid accurately. And when the glass sizes were the same, participants poured 9.2% less red wine than white because, the researchers theorize, the lower color contrast between white wine and a clear glass makes the glass look less full.

Gender made a difference too, as did body mass index (BMI). As in the world outside the lab, the men in the study poured more than the women did—about 9% more, the researchers found. And men with high BMI poured about 19% more than men with average BMI. For women, body mass didn’t make a difference. But there was a way for both sexes and all sizes to bring their intake down, and that was to establish—and stick to—simple rules of thumb.

For the purposes of consistency, the rule of thumb the researchers chose was the half-glass rule: drink as much as you want, but fill the glass only halfway up each time you pour. High-BMI men who didn’t use that rule drank 31% more than those who did, and men of average BMI drank 26% more. Women, on the whole, drank 27% less when they used the half-empty rule.

These aren’t hard and fast rules, of course. How much people pour in a single go is not the same as how much they drink, and it doesn’t take terribly sophisticated math to figure out that 16 half-glasses works out to a whole lot of wine. Rate of consumption—gulping versus sipping—makes a big difference too. Even the best rules of thumb can take you only so far. After that, it’s best just to leave the party early—without your car keys, thank you very much.